HENRIETTA, N.Y. — RIT’s MAGIC Center opened three years ago this month and continues to inspire its student ‘Magic Makers’ and now community game hobbyists and indie developers and their dreams to publish video games.

Denny McCorry is a SUNY Potsdam illustration grad who left his part-time delivery driver gig to open his own art and game studio, Possum House Games. He did it thanks to the mentoring, programming, marketing and funding assistance he got at RIT‘s MAGIC Center through the state’s NYSTAR community incubation program.

What You Need To Know

  • The RIT community incubator program assists indie developers in Rochester who are developing IP for commercial release

  • The RIT MAGIC Center helps recipients publish their game

  • The next call for proposals for the fifth round of participants will be in 2022

“I wasn’t a student at RIT, I did not go to school for gaming design and I was not a programmer,” Denny McCorry said. “But, I still have the skill set and knowledge to make games. They kind of filled in the blanks that I kind of missed out on.”

McCorry released his first video game, Shot in the Dark. It’s a point and click shooter game. You can find it on STEAM.

“Thanks to the incubator program I have the resources to do it the right way and make the game my way,” McCorry said.

He’s busy working on his next game with business partner, friend and programmer Lesther Reynoso.

“I have the techno-know-how to put things together and he has the design creativity to come up with these cool ideas,” said Reynoso.

“I pretty much live in front of this laptop," McCorry joked.

The gaming duo is busy working on their next video game prototype and pitching it to publishers so that we will all be able to play another video game by Possum House Games soon.

The NYSTAR community incubator program at RIT‘s MAGIC Center is pretty competitive. It’s open to independent game developers in Western New York who are not currently RIT students, staff or faculty.